Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently put to a blog entry at this site:
If you really had discovered something so revolutionary, would you have a strong vocal following by now?
Take a look at the “People Are Talking” section of the site, Questions. If you added together all the endorsements that every other financial blogger has ever obtained, they wouldn’t match the power of the endorsements that I have obtained just by myself. That’s an amazingly impressive reality.
No, I don’t have millions of people singing my praises, as you would expect given those endorsements. All you have to do to solve that puzzle is to go to the statements of the people who made the endorsements. One of the endorsements is from a New York Times blogger who said that he has read everything he can find about Valuation-Informed Indexing and that he believes that the work I have done is of HIUGE value. The same fellow banned me from his site! Why? He wants to make a buck. And Get Rich Quick schemes are the quickest way to make a buck in this field. Buy-and-Hold is the purest Get Rich Quick scheme ever concocted by the human mind. So he doesn’t want to upset the applecart.
Just about everyone in this field experiences that same tension today. Bill Bernstein has said important, honest things about stock investing. But he buries them in endorsements of Buy-and-Hold so that you Goons don’t come after him. It’s the same with Jack Bogle. It’s the same with Larry Swedroe. It’s the same with Scott Burns. Since you Goons threatened to destroy Wade Pfau’s career if he dared to continue to “cross” you by publishing honest research, it’s the same with Wade Pfau.
This is why I stress the importance of your prison sentence. People who are considering endorsing Buy-and-Hold strategies need to know that there will be consequences for doing so. Those people should be laughed at as woefully uninformed given that there is now 32 years of peer-reviewed academic research showing that there is precisely zero chance that a Buy-and-Hold strategy could ever work for a single long-term investor. In cases in which the Buy-and-Holders engage in criminal acts in “defense” of their Get Rich Quick claims, they need to be put in prison. Once prison sentences are announced, we are going to see a lot fewer Buy-and-Holders engaging in criminal acts of financial fraud.
We are working through this as a society. It pains people to acknowledge that they have been taken. We are experiencing feelings of shame and regret and anger and envy and all sorts of other ugly emotions. We need to focus more on the positive. We are the luckiest generation of investors that ever walked Planet Earth. We live at a time in which stocks have become virtually a risk-free asset class. But a lot of good it does us when we have adopted a Ban on Honest Posting on safe withdrawal rates and other critically important investment-related topics!
We need to get those prison sentences announced. Not because we like the idea of seeing our friends carted off to prison. Because we want as few people going to prison as possible and we want the sentences of those who do go to be as short as possible. The sooner we bring the economic crisis to an end and enter the greatest period of economic growth ever seen in our history, the less public anger there is going to be about what was done to us during the Buy-and-Hold years. The less public anger there is, the fewer prison sentences there are and the less lengthy are those that cannot be avoided.
Anyway, the intensity of my following is off the charts. There has never been anyone in this field who has received as many over-the-top endorsements of his work as I have received over the first 11 years of our discussions. But, no, you cannot expect lots of ordinary people to post here so long as the price paid for doing so is to receive death threats and to be banned from every board and blog on the internet and to see their reputations destroyed through tens of thousands of acts of defamation posts by you Goons.
There are good reasons why as a society we have adopted laws insuring that people who behave as you have will be sent away for long prison terms, Questions. Those long prison terms send a message to all members of our society as to the type of behavior we absolutely will not tolerate.
I naturally wish you all good things.
Rob, the Fellow Who Cares for the Goons and Thus Wants to See Their Prison Sentences Announced as Quickly as Possible
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